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| Further Objections from St. Paul Answered.
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Chapter
XIII.—Further Objections from St. Paul Answered.
“But again, writing to Timotheus, he
‘wills the very young (women) to marry, bear children, act the
housewife.’”669
He is (here)
directing (his speech) to such as he denotes above—“very
young widows,” who, after being, “apprehended” in
widowhood, and (subsequently) wooed for some length of time, after they
have had Christ in their affections, “wish to marry, having
judgment, because they have rescinded the first
faith,”—that (faith), to wit, by which they were
“found” in widowhood, and, after professing it, do not
persevere. For which reason he “wills” them to
“marry,” for fear of their subsequently rescinding the
first faith of professed widowhood; not to sanction their marrying as
often as ever they may refuse to persevere in a widowhood plied with
temptation—nay, rather, spent in indulgence.
“We read him withal writing to the
Romans: ‘But the woman who is under an husband, is bound to
her husband (while) living; but if he shall have died, she has been
emancipated from the law of the husband.’ Doubtless, then,
the husband living, she will be thought to commit adultery if she shall
have been joined to a second husband. If, however, the husband
shall have died, she has been freed from (his) law, (so) that she is
not an adulteress if made (wife) to another husband.”670
But read the sequel as well in order
that this sense, which flatters you, may evade (your grasp).
“And so,” he says, “my brethren, be ye too made dead
to the law through the body of Christ, that ye may be made (subject) to
a second,—to Him, namely, who hath risen from the dead, that we
may bear fruit to God. For when we were in the flesh, the
passions of sin, which (passions) used to be efficiently caused through
the law, (wrought) in our members unto the bearing of fruit to death;
but now we have been emancipated from the law, being dead (to that) in
which we used to be held,671
| 671 Comp. the marginal
reading in the Eng. ver., Rom.
vii. 6. | unto the serving of
God in newness of spirit, and not in oldness of letter.”
Therefore, if he bids us “be made dead to the law through the
body of Christ,” (which is the Church,672
which
consists in the spirit of newness,) not “through the letter of
oldness,” (that is, of the law,)—taking you away from the
law, which does not keep a wife, when her husband is dead, from
becoming (wife) to another husband—he reduces you to (subjection
to) the contrary condition, that you are not to marry when you
have lost your husband; and in as far as you would not be
accounted an adulteress if you became (wife) to a second husband after
the death of your (first) husband, if you were still bound to act in
(subjection to) the law, in so far as a result of the diversity of
(your) condition, he does prejudge you (guilty) of adultery if,
after the death of your husband, you do marry another: inasmuch
as you have now been made dead to the law, it cannot be lawful for you,
now that you have withdrawn from that (law) in the eye of which it
was lawful for you.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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